Are you fermenting your feed? If not, you need to start doing so.
Your birds will digest the food much easier and with greater weight gain per calorie of food. Once we started fermenting our
chicken feed, we realized that the birds enjoyed it much better than the dry mix, and we were able to cut it back to 2/3rds as much.
It's nothing sophisticated. I use 5 buckets in rotation.
Bucket 1: nothing but
water. I fill it every day and then let it sit for 24 hours so the chlorine gasses off.
Bucket 2: mix your feed with the water from bucket 1. Moisten it pretty well -- like a thick slurry.
Bucket 3: this is day 2 of your wet feed. You may see it start to bubble a bit.
Bucket 4: by day 3 your feed
should be starting to ferment and bubble away.
Bucket 5: this is what you feed the girls -- a four day ferment.
Like a
sourdough starter, if you use a little bit of the fermented feed with your new water/grain mix, it'll ferment much quicker -- 3 days is all it takes. Thus, you could get away with a 4 bucket system -- or even a 3 bucket system if you don't have to de-chlorinate your water.
There are all sorts of web-sites that talk about it. Here is one:
http://naturalchickenkeeping.blogspot.com/p/fermented-feed.html
I recently watched a Joel Salatan
video where he was talking about how to ferment feed for his hundreds and hundreds of birds. They can't quite figure a way to scale it up, but knowing him, he'll find a way. Wet feed is obviously much heavier and sloppier to work with than dry feed, so that's a consideration. But for weight gain and cost-savings, you can't beat it.
1
